


you take a lover for granted

by miekelele



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, I'm Sorry, Love Poems, Post-Endgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:47:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28266375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miekelele/pseuds/miekelele
Summary: She is not a poem kinda girl. She is not even a girl any longer. But she reads that poem and hates it and maybe she hates herself.Post-Endgame. Kathryn reads a poem and she regrets things. Canon compliant I guess. C/7.
Relationships: Chakotay/Kathryn Janeway, Chakotay/Seven of Nine
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17





	you take a lover for granted

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is my first story in this fandom and really, I don't even know why this has to be angst and drama and not a happy end. I love happy ends. I'm a sucker for happy ends. Do I read angst myself? No. Because you could say the world is angsty enough, right? But here I am giving you my first j/c and it's angst. Well. I'm sorry? 
> 
> This work was originally written in german and I translated it and honsetly I'm not too sure whether this was a good idea and I hope you guys are not cringing too much. So I'm sorry for any linguistic disasters. 
> 
> The poem is "Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell" by Marty McConnell and you should check out the whole thing because it's awesome: https://martyoutloud.com/fridakahlotomartymcconnell - you may came across "Take a lover that looks at you like maybe you are magic" on tumblr with you know people claim it's a Frida Kahlo quote and it's not but it's great nevertheless. 
> 
> Neither the characters nor the poem belong to me but I have two cute kitties so that's at least something.

She couldn't remember that poetry had ever meant anything to her. In fact, it wasn't that she didn't understand the beauty of language or the magic that transformed words into images. However, she had never been one of those girls hiding under her blanket in the evening and writing a poem. Never had she been one of those girls that sat down on the waterside with a book of poetry after an exhausting exam and cleared her head. Never been one of those girls who wrote a poem when her heart was broken.

Kathryn had always been a scientist, had known or guessed the explanation for the fascination with poems, the desire to put everything awful into the most beautiful words and make it a little less awful. Kathryn had explored it and she had understood it and then poems had just lost their appeal.

And now here she sat looking at a poem, a stupid poem - not particularly old, not written by a particularly special person at a particularly special moment in their life. And she wasn't even actually holding the special book - the real one, the one with paper and printed letters - but a PADD. Thinking about it carefully, she couldn't even tell anymore how she had come across the PADD or the poem. At some point it had flashed up on her screen because one line had interested her. Because she had hoped that line was part of a piece of writing that had as little to do with her as possible. And why not?

_Take  
a lover who looks at you  
like maybe you are magic_

Love, she thought, was what it was all about, the thing they had never had at any time and the thing he had now, with a younger, fairer, more fascinating woman than she was. And she had hoped to read it and finish it with a shake of her head, because what was the good of love if those involved were giving themselves up after all? And she felt it wasn't for her, not anymore, not under any circumstances. Love was for young people. People who still had a lot to do and a great deal to experience. And they needed love for that, to share what they had experienced. But there was nothing that was to come now to make her life worth sharing, so she had no need of this self-sacrifice.

But then she had read the first lines of the poem and her hopes had vanished, for the poem to have nothing to do with her, and with it the anger, leaving behind the very inner she had barely known herself.

_leaving is not enough; you must  
stay gone. train your heart  
like a dog. change the locks  
even on the house he’s never  
visited._

There was no way she was going to sit there, tearing the poem apart line by line and making it fit the reality of her own life, and there was no need to, since all the relevant things were written between the lines, in a special address, as if this were all about her, Admiral Kathryn Janeway. As if this was her house. Her home. As if she had made the decision to leave.

But where to go when one had never been anywhere before? The decision had been taken from her when suddenly it was clear that no matter where she stood, it was not next to him, because that place was occupied, and it was absurd for her to feel hurt because of that. Utterly absurd. 

_you had to have him.  
and you did. and now you pull down  
the bridge between your houses._

She was a scientist, she reminded herself. Her job was to understand things. And so she went about understanding her feelings, the combination of her thoughts and their physiological appearances. The heartbeat, the trembling, the lump in her throat. And she knew that her behaviour had made his worse, because it was not he who had chosen against them both, it was she who had done it.

And she would do it again and again given the same circumstances. This is where her anger came from. Her anger came from a situation that of course was her own fault. Because if he had been happy, with her or the promise of one day having a real chance of being with her, he wouldn't have sought an alternative. He wouldn't have been so easily persuaded. After all, what was it that connected the two of them?

Kathryn winced. What connected him and Seven was simply none of her business. Even though she knew them both so well. Or at least she thought she knew them so well. It was not her place to judge their compatibility. It wasn't her job. But Seven, of all people.

_you take a lover  
for granted, you take  
a lover who looks at you  
like maybe you are magic_

She remembered New Earth and Quarra and all the little moments in between when she had known they were special. Just as he had told her and shown her, countless times - except too often Kathryn wouldn't listen. Too often other things were more important because she believed it was her own needs that she was so heroically putting behind. Because she was a martyr and, if she was honest - and there was no one here but herself - she enjoyed that role. But she hadn't done her job well, hadn't comprehended the problem well, and only now - that famous now when it was usually too late - did she understand that it was really never about her own feelings. It was about his. It was about the one wish he had, that he had dared to show and say. Self-centred as she was, it was something she had never noticed. But she had refused him, the most loyal and brave man at her side, that one wish. And now she was annoyed that he had made a different wish? One that she could not deny him. He in fact had not left. He had freed himself from her. And that was good. Or was it? It was.

_don’t lose too much weight.  
stupid girls are always trying  
to disappear as revenge. and you  
are not stupid. you loved a man  
with more hands than a parade  
of beggars, and here you stand. heart  
like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.  
heart leaking something so strong  
they can smell it in the street._

Yet in the end it was nothing more than a silly poem unrelated to her. She pulled back the woollen blanket that she had pathetically draped over her legs. She drained the tea she had prepared. His favourite tea. She believed it would help. But actually, it tasted awful, and she preferred coffee. Black.

Oh, and she would get to work, because there was always work to be done. And when in doubt, it was always facts and figures that had brought her comfort, not the words of a poem that had nothing to do with her whatsoever.

90% of all humanoid life forms experience heartbreak, at least something similar. And perhaps, like Kathryn, they also found some comfort in having loved at all.

And how intensely she had loved.


End file.
